Melissa Harrison
Novelist, podcaster, evangelist: Melissa Harrison talks walking, writing, and how she brought the Hidden Folk back to the world…
“I THINK OF my brain as a compost heap.
I have to chuck loads of stuff on it, and it will all rot down and what comes out will be different from what I put on. But the rotting down only really happens when I’m walking.”
In the thriving market of nature writing there are many star names, but few have had quite the impact of Melissa Harrison. Novels, non-fiction, anthologies. Children’s books, memoirs, a chart-topping podcast. Melissa is on a mission to strengthen our link with nature, and people are paying attention in their thousands. Let’s start with the podcast. Titled The Stubborn Light of Things and recorded between spring and autumn last year, it became a ray of light and hope through the toughest of times. It was the simplest of ideas: Melissa, walking from her home in Suffolk, observing the changes in the countryside as spring bloomed and summer flourished.
“Before Covid, I was planning a four-part podcast; it was meant to be quite glossy, recorded in a studio with guests and all that,” explains Melissa.
“Then the end of the world began and I suddenly knew what had to happen. Millions of people were confined indoors, unable to connect to nature, but I could take them for a walk and help them share it.”
People listened. In droves. It quickly became Apple’s all-time number one nature podcast in the UK, hitting 13,500 listeners at its peak. Although it finished in the autumn, it remains available across all podcast platforms. The star of the show is Suffolk, the county in which Melissa made her home after upping sticks from London four years ago. She fell in love with the county while researching her novel All Among the Barley, which is set in East Anglia in 1933, as the age-old agrarian way of life comes under threat from modernism.
“Moving to Suffolk was a real leap in the dark,” she says. “I didn’t know anyone here, and I moved in the dead of winter to a 300-year-old cottage with no central heating. It’s only looking back that I can realise how scared I was.”
But her love for the county has only deepened over time. “It’s a place where the past is really present,” she explains. “I think that’s because it was hard to access for a long time. The Victorians didn’t come out and rebuild everything so there’s a lot of really lovely old buildings still standing. I’ve got an AA book of British walks from 1975 and there are no walks at all in Suffolk, which is extraordinary.”
The county’s rural nature makes it a focal point for one of Melissa’s key interests: the relationship between conservation, farming and walking.
“Increasingly we are coming to view farmland as being shared; that it’s a common good,” she says. “But when I speak to farmers, a lot of them find that a difficult concept, because this land is theirs; their families have farmed it for 700 years. So there’s a difficulty to address there. And farmers are too often demonised. People accuse them of being rich, living off subsidies. It’s nonsense, because life is extremely hard and the margins are very small. So I’d like to help both sides understand each other.”
She points out a recent picture she saw on Twitter, of a helpful sign placed on a field-edge path, explaining not only what the crop was, but how it would be used, what the cycle of usage would be, and how wildlife would thrive alongside it.
“I’d love to see more of that,” she adds.
Most recently, her interest in helping people understand the countryside has manifested in the Melissa Harrison and (inset) her latest book, By Oak, Ash and Thorn.
The Suffolk countryside that put Melissa under its spell. Inset: Melissa’s dad Peter, who inspired her love of nature. “He’d take us walking over Dartmoor and we whinged. It was only in my 20s I realised how grateful I was for that.”
first of a duo of children’s books. By Oak, Ash and
Thorn is a beautiful tale mixing fantasy and nature knowledge, and was inspired by the 1942 classic
The Little Grey Men by Denys Watkins-Pitchford. Setting the story in modern times, Melissa has also ensured that it moves between countryside and town, to show young readers that wildlife is alive and thriving even in the most urban settings.
“We’re all worried about kids’ connection to nature, but where are the kind of books that I grew up on? What’s today’s Watership Down or Tarka the
Otter? So I’ve stepped into the breach and hopefully others will follow.”
And like all her endeavours, it’s driven by a sense of evangelism.
“I want to connect people to this thing I think is so valuable, not just because of the good it does us to be connected to nature, but because nature needs us to be connected to it as well,” she explains.
“The more of us that value of it, the more of us that will protect it. I’ll say that to whoever will listen.”
By Oak, Ash and Thorn is available now, published by Chicken House. Its sequel By Rowan and Yew will be published in October. Find out more at
melissaharrison.co.uk. And if you’re a Country Walking+ subscriber, you’ll find a fuller version of this interview in your email inbox.